Well this is embarrassing. I am typing this on a Windows machine out of frustration. I'm a great fan and long time user of LM13 (Maya) which I have found to be stable for quite some time running on my circa 2004 32-bit XP machine. It's been a joy to use. I recently installed LM13 Cinnamon 64-bit on my new Dell Inspirion Ultrabook and really like changes. Unfortunately, I have had several total freezes which have required hard boots each time, since nothing on the Dell functioned. In fact, my fifth freeze this afternoon has forced me to use my Windows PC to write this post. The version of Cinnamon I'm using is 1.4-UP3. I've read numerous posts in trying to determine how to resolve the freeze problem without success. One of the posts I read mentioned a newer release of Cinnamon that seemed to be more stable than earlier releases. Following that post up, I saw where Clem announced the release of Cinnamon 1.6.7. Unfortunately, the LM13 synaptics package manager does not show this release available and I'm struggling to find where I can download it or if it is even available for LM13. The Dell Ultrabook utilizes UEFI secure boot and I spent many hours learning how to get LM13 to operate on it. I'm really reluctant to uninstall LM13 at this point but may have to if I can't resolve the freeze issue with Cinnamon. Any help or info would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

I am afraid I cannot directly help you analyze and solve the freeze issues which you experience on your brandnew Dell notebook which is much newer than my office notebook Dell Latitude E6400. The most important change on that notebook to prevent the GUI from freezing (only the GUI, not the whole OS) was by adding the parameter "acpi_osi=linux" to the file /etc/default/grub and run "sudo update-grub" afterwards.I will not bet that solving your hangs is as trivial.

Anyway, about getting Cinnamon 1.6.7 on Mint 13 from the Linux Mint repository, this is trivial: Activate backports inside Synaptic. Cinnamon 1.6.7 comes to Mint 13 as a backport from Mint 14.

Just a followup to let you know that the information you provided me with for backporting allowed me to update to Cinnamon 1.6.7 for Linux Mint 13. After running through several scenarios, most of which either individually or in conjunction with one another, would have frozen my system, I'm glad to report that I did not experience a single freeze up. The work that Clem and his team did to fix many of the bugs in the earlier release of Maya Cinnamon have worked well. While all freeze problems may or may not have been eliminated, only time will tell. The improvements in my system performance is wonderful.

The only thing I have found disappointing is that version 1.6.7 did not show up as an automatic update in the Synaptics Update Manager. That would likely have solved a lot of problems and frustration levels for many users with similar problems as my own. I believe that there is another Cinnamon release due out soon which hopefully will stabilize and further improve the Cinnamon desktop. Mint just keeps gets better and better under Clem and his staff of talented developers.

After enabling backports and installing Cinnamon 1.6.7, I now am faced with a blank desktop with no icons or system tray. Cinnamon appears to be broken. Is there a way to restart or repair Cinnamon short of reinstalling Mint13? Thanks for your help.

Might be that you are a (temporary) victim of the fact that+ the old Cinnamon used Nautilus to handle the desktop+ Cinnamon brings along Nemo to handle the desktop.And there have been other threads where users reported problems, because both Nautilus and Nemo both tried to handle the desktop and because both were launched on each logon.

You might wish to launch the menu item "Startup programmes" and check each item in the list. There might be two entries labelled "Files", one launching Nautilus, one launching Nemo.If this is the case disable Nautilus.Logoff and log back in.Next use the menu item Cinnamon Settings and make sure that the desktop is still configured to display those icon which you want to be displayed.

Sorry, cannot give any more detailled instructions at this point in time, because I am typing on Mint 13 xfce desktop.

One problem I have is that the icons in the system tray do not appear correctly. Sometimes thay are just grey boxes other times the icon for gnote is just a thin yellow line. I only have the two icons there - Update Manager and Gnote.

The other thing is a question - When I installed the backports I followed the instructions forom here http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2225 I just installed the level 1 updates. There were no level 2 updates. However there are three level 3 updates for network-manager-gnome, libnm-gtk0 and, lib-nm-gtk-common. My question is should I install these, or ignore them. If I iognore them how do I get the update manager to stop displaying the ! telling me there are updates?

Might be that you are a (temporary) victim of the fact that+ the old Cinnamon used Nautilus to handle the desktop+ Cinnamon brings along Nemo to handle the desktop.And there have been other threads where users reported problems, because both Nautilus and Nemo both tried to handle the desktop and because both were launched on each logon.

You might wish to launch the menu item "Startup programmes" and check each item in the list. There might be two entries labelled "Files", one launching Nautilus, one launching Nemo.If this is the case disable Nautilus.Logoff and log back in.Next use the menu item Cinnamon Settings and make sure that the desktop is still configured to display those icon which you want to be displayed.

Sorry, cannot give any more detailled instructions at this point in time, because I am typing on Mint 13 xfce desktop.

HTH,Karl

Karichen, thanks for the tip, but the only items that work are Ctrl-Alt-Delete and mouse movements. No other key combinations work, and there is no top or bottom bar. If I log into Gnome Session, neither Nemo or Nautilus show in the "startup Programs" list. All was running fine until I added Cinnamon 1.6.7 through "backports" so I could change the panel size.

Afterwards open the "Startup Programs" again. Now there should be at minimum 1 item labelled "Files". The properties of the item will tell whether it launches Nemo or Nautilus. In case there are two items in the list labelled "Files", one will be for Nautilus and one will be for Nemo.

I decided (before reading your last post) to just reinstall, since it was basically fresh anyway. This time I enabled "backports" before doing the initial updates and now all is running normal. The first time I added Cinnamon 1.6.7 using Synaptic Package Manager rather than through updates, which may have caused my problem. I did your suggestion on the new install to add all autostart items and under "Files" there is the Nemo entry.